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A century before civil rights, Black oystermen in Suffolk forged economic independence

A painting print hanging in the home of George Pope Jr. Left to right, it depicts George Pope, Sr., George Pope, Jr., and Malcolm Spratley, Sr. on their boat, the Virginia Slim, on Chuckatuck Creek in Hobson in the 1960s. The painting is by J. Robert Burnell, with the print attributed to Pat Sheffield.

One by one, 6 feet apart, the many granddaughters and friends of Marie Hill climbed the three brick steps of her porch in mid-February to pay their respects. They waved through the front door of the Suffolk home where Hill had lived for more than 80 years.

“Happy birthday to you. Happy 100th birthday to you,” sang one well-wisher — before adding, almost to himself, “I hope I live that long.”

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“You’re a queen,” gushed another. Hill wore a tiara to match, above a regal purple sweater. A garden’s worth of flowers rested on her porch, next to where the Rev. Isaac Baker, from nearby Metropolitan Baptist Church, played a celebratory calfskin drum until his hands got too cold to continue, a Black Lives Matter mask covering the lower half of his face.

They had come to celebrate a century of life for “Queen Mother Marie Hill” — a woman who’d fought for her children to be among the first to integrate local schools, before finally getting her own GED at age 92.

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A birthday card celebrating the 100th birthday of Marie Hill, who came from an oystering family in Hobson, Suffolk, an African-American oystering village whose roots go back to the Civil War.

Hill’s life is impressive on its own terms. But she is also one of the oldest living representatives of a singular history in Hampton Roads — one whose place is attested by a sign across Crittenden Road from her home.

Emblazoned with the seal of Virginia, the sign declares her Hobson neighborhood, near Crittenden, the home of “AFRICAN AMERICAN OYSTERMEN”, with beds that numbered among the “richest in the world.”

For multiple generations, Hill’s family — including her husband, Ernest Hill, Jr. — had oystered out of Chuckatuck Creek.

Stretching back to the Civil War, the waterways of Virginia offered formerly enslaved people an economic independence almost unheard of otherwise, said retired Norfolk State University archivist Tommy Bogger. And Hobson is historically one of the most significant Black oyster communities in the region.

“It is the oldest such community I’ve encountered (in Southeastern Virginia) that is documented as really tracing back to the Civil War,” Bogger said.

At its peak in 1910, the village was home to nearly 500 people. With money earned working farms and once-prosperous oyster beds, Hobson residents were able to live in relative independence. That independence was necessary, Bogger said: Residents were not offered easy access to government resources. They built their own church and homes, dug a shared artesian well for water, and banded together to buy a bus to send their children to school.

“We developed a village that was proud, determined, spiritually based, thriving, self-sufficient and self-sustaining for that period of time in U.S. history,” said Marie’s daughter, Mary, who spearheaded a successful campaign to make Hobson a national historic landmark.

“Blacks did not have to go anywhere to look for jobs. All they had to do was learn the trade of catching oysters,” Hobson oysterman George Hatten told Hill in an oral history gathered in 2001. “We pass it on from one generation to another.”

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Unlike much history that survives only in books, Hill said, the residents of Hobson are still here to attest to that story — as she and her mother did a decade ago, when they traveled to Washington as ambassadors for the Black oystering community at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival.

“When the National Park Service came down here and visited us, they were amazed,” she said. “They said, you can go to monuments, and there’ll be someone there to tell the story. But what’s so unique about the Hobson village is that the people are still here. They’re descendants of the original people that are still thriving.”

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A path to independence on the water

A Virginia Landmarks Register marker commemorating the village of Hobson in Suffolk, one of the oldest and most significant African-American oystering communities in the region.

In 1866, an editor at the Norfolk Virginian newspaper, a precursor to The Virginian-Pilot, had what he considered a problem.

During the Civil War, Black Virginians had fled slave plantations to the relative safety of Union-held Fort Monroe. And as the war ended, a number of newly freed people had settled in often dismal refugee camps along the waterways of the Peninsula, according to historian Robert Eng’s account of the period. Nearby white populations felt threatened by the region’s new residents.

The Virginian’s purported concern, however, was oysters.

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Specifically, the editor was worried that free Black people on the Peninsula had access to the means for economic self-sufficiency.

“By fishing in the summer and oystering in the winter, they manage to eke out a scanty and precarious subsistence,” the newspaper claimed. “The abundant resources of the water” were “sufficient for the blacks own few wants, but contributes nothing to the wealth of the community.”

Conditions were nowhere near as free and easy as the newspaper described, wrote Bogger in his account. The camps were instead wracked by malnutrition and disease, and those who settled nearby were subject to attacks by white vigilantes.

But beginning in 1865, in present-day Hobson, a group of freed families were indeed able to travel down the local waterways to find the hard-won sovereignty the newspaper editor feared they’d achieve. Sixteen families from the Carter’s Grove plantation were joined by former refugees from Yorktown, along Chuckatuck Creek and the Nansemond River.

In an area that was then called Barrett’s Neck, oystermen could buy licenses from the state to work the public creekbeds, literally staking their claims with poles in the water.

The waters offered a first taste of economic independence.

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Black oystermen tong from a bustling fleet of oyster canoes  in the waters near Hampton. Courtesy of the Hampton History Museum

“When Civil War ended in 1865, the water became a gateway for large numbers of newly freed slaves who were working for themselves for the first time,” retired Hampton History Museum curator Michael Cobb told the Daily Press in 2018.

“Before the war you were a slave who worked for someone else. But after that, you were an oysterman. You were a boatman. And you worked hard and made good money for yourself and your family. That made you somebody — and being somebody was everything if you had been a slave.”

In Hobson, oysters were the occupation of more than half the people who settled there. It was back-breaking work. Oystermen tonged the beds with 15-foot rakes, for oysters that could be sold by the bushel to hungry Northerners.

Already, oysters were big business on the Chesapeake Bay. In 1869, the state auditor estimated 640,000 acres of beds, with an annual worth of $10 million.

By 1872, six freed families in Hobson were able to work hard enough to buy land from nearby farmers, opening up new avenues for income. Seven years later, the families who’d settled there — along what is now Crittenden Road — were able to build the first incarnation of Macedonia Baptist Church, which still performs services today.

Though oystering was a dominantly Black profession in Hampton Roads after the Civil War, the lucrative industry became increasingly attractive to white settlers in Crittenden and Eclipse, next door to Hobson.

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But white oystermen showed less interest in tonging shells on the creek near Hobson, according to Hobson oysterman Ernest Wilson, because heavy mud often covered up the oyster beds after rainstorms.

The vast majority of the community that settled in Hobson was Black; as late as 1930, Hobson was home to only 10 white landowners.

By that time, more than half of the Black families in Hobson owned land, and literacy rates had increased from less than a third to more than 50%, with the vast majority of children attending school. More than two thirds found work in the oyster industry, whether as tongers or shuckers.

But the village’s name was nonetheless decided by one of the few white landowners in the area.

In 1900, James “Bud” Johnson owned the general store. And as often happened, the store also served as the local post office. For reasons lost to time, Johnson proposed naming the post office after a now-obscure naval hero of the Spanish-American War: Richmond Pearson Hobson.

Hobson had a singular claim to fame. Broadly embellished accounts of his time as a war prisoner had made him popular with the press — and apparently, also with crowds of women who greeted him at train stations. He proudly wore the title of “the most kissed man in America.”

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“Now, what on earth am I to do — run away? Shall a man dodge, when pretty women crowd around him?” he asked the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, two years before becoming Hobson’s namesake. “It may be silly, but any man with any gallantry or decency in him would do just as I have done—kiss ‘em all.”

And now, he is commemorated forever in Suffolk.

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A hard-fought living

Though the village of Hobson came to prosper over the years, life on the oyster boats wasn’t easy, remembered Marie Hill.

Hobson village was so off-grid when she was young, Hill said, that they didn’t have electricity and had to chop wood to keep warm. She used to make skirts from old feed bags. And in the winter mornings when her husband and father and brothers went out to oyster, the water of the creek was often frozen over.

“They had to go out on the river and break the ice to tong the oysters,” Hill said, “They had these long tongs.”

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“My mom used to prepare my dad for getting up to go out in the river in the mornings,” said Mary Hill. “It was so cold when they were out there tonging. I can remember my dad when he would come home and have icicles hanging from his head. We used to pluck the icicles off his hat. ... He used to have his boots insulated with newspaper.”

George Pope, Jr., a 59-year-old oysterman from Hobson who learned the trade from his father, remembers his father coming off the night shift at Smithfield Foods to go out tonging on their boat — the Virginia Slim — in the early morning hours when it was still dark.

A painting print hanging in the home of George Pope Jr. Left to right, it depicts George Pope, Sr., George Pope, Jr., and Malcolm Spratley, Sr. on their boat, the Virginia Slim, on Chuckatuck Creek in Hobson in the 1960s. The painting is by J. Robert Burnell, with the image attributed to Pat Sheffield.

“When it was really cold, we would crack ice with tongs and axes and heavy chains just to get out of the creek to go work up the Nansemond, and then we had to do the same thing just to get back. It’d freeze back over.”

Again and again, Hobson’s residents had to work together to provide basic public services.

In 1937, they bought their own school bus to send their children to high school. After World War II, during which many Hobson men fought for their country, the residents built their own artesian well so that they wouldn’t have to pay for water from a nearby landowner. They installed an independent plumbing system. And in 1961, Hobson residents paid to install their own streetlights.

Pope said the waters could be treacherous, even more so because they had to fill their boats with oysters to make enough money to justify a day’s work. According to Hill, this shared risk led to kinship between Black and white oystermen in the area.

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“Everyone looked out for each other on the river,” she said. “Once you get on land it’s a different case, but on the river it was life or death. It didn’t matter who you were.”

In 1968, a boat filled with seed oysters — the last boat of the season that year — capsized in March, killing four Hobson oystermen in what became known as the Klondike tragedy. The entire community came together to grieve.

“The sorrow displayed that day from the black and white communities of Eclipse, Crittenden and Hobson was extraordinary. All the families went to the black church that morning for their services….” said Suffolk’s Everett Hale Newman, in Karla Smith’s oral history, The River Binds Us. “The church was overflowing. … black and whites all lined together.”

Still, Hill noted that her father didn’t get nearly the same rates for an oyster bushel that white oystermen received.

“It was still big money for for Black people, for African Americans,” Hill said. “But it was not equal.”

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The decline and fall of Hobson oystering

But 1968 was a tragic year for more reasons than the capsizing of the Klondike. That year also marked the beginning of the end for the oyster industry in Hobson.

That was the year that the Army Corps of Engineers built a dam across Carter’s Cove Creek, cutting off Hobson oystermen’s access to Chuckatuck Creek and the James River. Previously, oystermen could dock their boats close to home. But after the dam arrived, oystermen had to pay marina fees on larger boats, or drive to mooring sites that might be 45 minutes away by boat.

“No one consulted the Blacks about their outlet to the oyster grounds,” Bogger said. “No consideration was given to the residents of Hobson, and the impact that action would have. It caused a tremendous hardship on them… it shows how powerless the Black community was.”

By then, oyster populations had already begun to decline. Parasitic diseases began afflicting local oysters as early as the 1950s. And in 1975, it was revealed that the Allied Chemical plant in Hopewell had been dumping cancer-linked Kepone into the James River for nearly a decade, all but shutting down fishing in the river for years to come.

Oystering went from one of the largest sources of income for Black residents to a rare occupation.

“When the Kepone came, many of the men ended up at the shipyard, the meatpacking company, the Navy,” Mary Hill said. Her father found work at the shipyard as a welder. Many in Hobson’s younger generations also left the area to find other opportunities.

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By 2007, according to Hobson’s Maxie Brinkley, just six or seven active oyster boats were left.

In the meantime, said Hill, the area has changed rapidly. She’s fought the demolition of old buildings in Hobson, even as new upscale housing developments have sprung up nearby. Palatial waterside mansions at the Governor’s Pointe development, a mile down the road, are now listed for prices as high as $925,000.

In this 2002 photo, then-Suffolk Councilman E. Dana Dickens III is seen with Mary Hill in front of the former Masonic Lodge. The Lodge was demolished in 2011.

Hill views it as her mission to ensure that Hobson’s history is not plowed under. When she was young, she remembers the men in her family telling her to hold on to the oyster grounds — because one day oystering would return to the Chesapeake.

“They said, ‘Don’t let these grounds go. You’re going to need them for survival,’” Hill said.

The Hill family hung onto the family’s oyster claims, paying taxes on them each year. And as oystering in the Bay has seen a comeback, Hill founded a company two years ago called Barrett’s Neck Seafood to restart the family business. Her plans have been disrupted during the pandemic, but she hopes to obtain dealer certification soon.

She views the company as a reclamation of her family’s self-sufficiency on the water — and the continuation of an important piece of African American history.

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“It is my calling to resurrect this industry,” she said, “using the path of the waterways that we used for our freedom, to resurrect it again for our livelihood... I want (Hobson) to be preserved as more than just something you read about in a history book, or on some rusty highway marker.”

Matthew Korfhage, 757-446-2318, matthew.korfhage@pilotonline.com


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